President Eliot, of Harvard: "His life, wonderfully active and energetic, was brought, by excessive work, to too early a close."
THE MEANING OF PUBLIC OWNERSHIP.
A Radical View of a Radical Policy, as
Expressed by a Well-Known
Radical of Chicago.
Publicists are generally agreed as to the meaning of the great changes now progressing in American political sentiment. The country, we are informed, after wrestling successfully with the problems of the accumulation of wealth, is ready to concern itself with the equitable distribution of what has been accumulated. We are growing rich almost too fast. We produce such vast quantities of everything needed by mankind that we hear of "production outrunning consumption."
In this new condition Clarence S. Darrow, the well-known Chicago lawyer and student of economics, sees the explanation of the growth of sentiment favoring public ownership. Writing in the International Quarterly, he takes advanced Radical ground as follows:
Public ownership sentiment has had a remarkable growth in the United States during the last ten years. This sentiment is one of the many manifestations of the deep conviction that the present division of wealth is at once unjust and absurd. All sorts of theories for the more equitable distribution of wealth have found ready advocates on the platform and in the press in every enlightened nation of the world. However various the plans and schemes of social change, it is beyond dispute that the tendency of all nations has been toward a wider and completer collective life. In every country in the world the people have been constantly enlarging the functions and duties of the State, and political organizations are more and more becoming industrial institutions.
In Europe, municipal and even national ownership of public utilities is no longer looked upon as radical or new, and the rapid growth of these ideas abroad has had much to do with sentiment in the United States.
The most casual student of social questions has likewise seen the enormous fortunes that have been built up by the private ownership of public utilities. The larger part of all the stocks and bonds issued by public-service corporations are based upon franchises and not on private property. By this means the public is constantly and systematically taxed upon its own property, and this vast tax, in the shape of interest on bonds and dividends on stock, is taken by a handful of exploiters and stock-jobbers—who have thus contrived to build up private fortunes from public wealth.
GOOD ADVICE, GRATIS, FROM A RICH MAN.
The Characteristic Philosophy of Russell
Sage, the Most Contented Multi-Millionaire
in New York.